This month is the centennial celebration of Robert Heinlein's birthday. In honor of it, the Wall Street Journal has this opinion piece by Taylor Dinerman celebrating the author's legacy. It provides a good overview of Heinlein's career, though it ignores the sexual weirdness that factored into much of Heinlein's later work (e.g. his obsession with incest in Time Enough for Love).

That said, the column has some great quotes from one of my favorite Heinlein novels, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which should be required reading for today's youth (and politicians). Yes, Starship Troopers usually gets most of the love from the patriotic proto-fascist crowd, but it's Harsh Mistress is the book that offers us the most concrete, pragmatic and practical advice:

The core of this book, which keeps it near the top of the libertarians' reading lists, is the speech by an old professor, Bernardo de la Paz, to the rebels' constitutional convention: "...like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master. You now have your freedom -- if you can keep it. But do remember that you can lose this freedom more quickly to yourselves than to any other tyrant."

The professor explains: "The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys. I was not joking when I told them to dig into their own pouches. It may not be possible to do away with government -- sometimes I think that it is an inescapable disease of human beings. But it may be possible to keep it small and starved and inoffensive -- and can you think of a better way than by requiring the governors themselves to pay the costs of their antisocial hobby."

Can you imagine that? A world in which politicians had to pay for their grandiose projects out of their own money, rather than picking the pockets of the common folk?